I'm a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. For 20+ years I've been practicing on 12th Street, around the corner from the Forbes Building and right in the middle of the digital revolution — both of them. Having written for professional audiences and become a not infrequent source (e.g., Wired, New York, NY Times, The Today Show) I figured Web 2.0 was the right time to put my ideas out there myself. First at True/Slant, then Psychology Today, and now at Forbes, my "beat" includes clinical insights and research developments useful for building an authentically good life in our increasingly complex and technologically-mediated world, along with identifying those choices that promise more than they can deliver. Along with my full-time private practice I'm a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute and a Clinical Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at New York Medical College.

Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban telecommuting at Yahoo reveals the powerfully subversive, and inconvenient, truth that being bodies together matters. Coming from the new CEO of the granddaddy of Internet companies, someone who is also the mother of a young child, this policy is an impossible to ignore “Nixon goes to China” moment. It opens the old territory of technological solutions for work/family conflicts to a new gaze. And what we see thanks to Mayer is that even the best technological solutions to work/family conflicts have limits. However much we might want to believe that everything everywhere all the time is possible, it is not.

Obviously, women are especially interested in Yahoo’s new policy. Maureen Dowd wrote that Mayer has set off a “fem-quake with a decision that has a special significance to working mothers.” She has shaken-up what for many has been an attempt to achieve “work-life balance.” But, the aftershocks extend well-beyond destabilizing a gender-specific issue. The new policy also reminds everyone of some things modern life almost requires us to forget: screen-relations technologies, like video-conferencing, enable mediated simulations of direct bodies-together social connection; all screen-relations have limits and possibilities different than those experienced while being bodies together; and the processes that construct the tech-mediated experience of other people are different than those used when relating directly to another person.

Therefore, screen-relations are good for some purposes, not good for others. However much people use their screen-relations as a transition to direct experience, time together is still the shared experiential capital from which we grow our capacity for screen-relations. Being bodies together is still bedrock. And while Yahoo’s new policy has been a lightening-rod for criticism, what Mayer’s critics seem to forget (including here at Forbes where the decision has been called an “epic fail” that goes “back to the stone age”) is that sometimes an organization needs to invest in the additional experiential capital only acquired from being bodies together.

Lets look at an example of the power of time together that would hit especially close to home for working mothers. Consider families that take a break from their screen-relations to have dinner together, the “Family Meal” Laurie David has been championing. We know from a 2010 study in the Journal of Family Psychology that ”families with teenagers may enhance parent–child communication and ultimately promote healthy adolescent development by making family dinner a priority.” Another 2010 study this time from the Journal of Adolescence shows the converse: fewer family dinners is correlated with a bunch of problematic adolescent behaviors (“substance-use and running away for females; drinking, physical violence, property-destruction, stealing and running away for males”).

In other words, being bodies together really does matter. It increases things you want, like communication. It decreases what you want to avoid, such as adolescent bad behavior or employees launching their own start-ups on company time.

Part of the value comes from the fact that being bodies together takes effort. Clearly Yahoo’s new policy will make showing up for work more inconvenient. Perhaps impossible for some. But there is value in the inconvenience, more value than the obvious ”trimming dead wood.” When managers also show up it helps breed group cohesion. And there’s more. We know that attitudes often change so as to be made consistent with what one has already done (the traditional concept of “cognitive dissonance” as pioneered by Leon Festinger). If it takes more work to get to work then for those able to avoid rebellious resentment—either from their own reslience or the presence of emotionally attuned good-enough management—it is likely their attitude will shift towards a greater commitment to the company. That’s right: commitment follows effort.

No corporate culture change is painless, nor is success a sure thing. Regardless of where Yahoo is a year from now, I believe Mayer deserves applause for reminding us that we matter to each other; that value gets built from the time and effort spent being bodies together; and that there are limits, even for the digerati, to what technologically-mediated simulations of direct human interaction—all the screen-relations that fill so much of our time—can accomplish.

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I think she is wrong to ban ALL telecommuting. There are times when an individual and the company can profit from allowing someone to telecommute on a limited basis. If a person who telecommutes is not getting work done, then it is up to management to revoke those privileges for that one individual. They shouldn’t penalize everyone for one person’s abuse of the system. I hope that she rethinks her complete ban on telecommuting.

If people work better face to face in cube farms does this mean the end of sending work offshore? That is a better question to address.

Yahoo is like a Dilbert comic. Stick a fork in Yahoo they are done and more or less irrelevant in today’s market having been stomped by Google and using Bing for their results. Far better places to go on the web. Even the founder left that sinking ship.

Their clear disrespect for their own telecommuting service that they offer make it clear they haven’t got a clue as to how to survive. They even screwed up a buyout offer that would have let them survive.

† Most difficult to expand on such fine literary work, in that being true. Bodies together is truly the bedrock you highlight. It is truly refreshing to see such quality magnified. How many can actually see, or comprehend the value of felloship?

Surely, commitment follows effort as you make mention. We move further in that we add dedication and devotion as a final analysis. One of the very finest articles I’ve read Todd.

Telecommuting conveys the benefits of being an employee (salary deductions, nice benefits, tenure, vacation, someone else paying for equipment, supplies, and overhead) with the benefits of being an independent contractor (one’s own workplace and work space, choice of how and when to work, creative control).

It’s hard to see how getting rid of telecommuting will save Yahoo, but it does take a step towards acknowledging that Yahoo’s rise was related more to being in the right place at the right time rather than any particular genius or creativity or ‘specialness’ of employees. After the growth spurt from being at the right place at the right time one has to stop believing the marketing hype about special genius and start believing in corporate culture, teamwork, and productivity.

By all means Yahoo should continue to allow people to work at home, but as independent contractors, not employees. Rewards should be consistent with risks.

If we could only get companies that skirt immigration laws like United Airlines and Cox and all the others who use offshore call centers (where the employees can barely speak English), and who use these call centers to replace local employees like ticket agents, installation help and the like, then life–and probably business, retail, and employment, too–would be better for all of us.

Great post. Spot-on. Working together means being together and to say this has no value is just wanting to have it your way. Telecommuting is the ultimate in “phoning it in” and the lard bricks, the passive-aggressive, the stonewallers love it because someone ELSE is in the office to deal with all the tough stuff. All the studies show is that people not in the office love the arrangement. Well duh, we know THAT. Mayer is right about this and anyone who wants to whine about having to get up, go to work and focus on the job needs to just resign. Working from home is an impediment to getting things done as a company. Wake up, take a shower, show your commitment and get your *** in the office.

I truly believe that it was a purposeful decision for Yahoo to pick this female CEO. I believe they have been wanting this for a long while and they knew a male CEO, or even a childless female CEO would not be able to do this without some legal problems. No they picked their scape goat and she followed throgh beautifully.

While I’m sure Catbert would disagree all Yahoo needs to do to achieve its synergy goal is to mandate that all employees spend a minimum number of hours per week in cubicle land during the priime time hours of 1 and 3 in the afternoon while instituting a very clear “scoreboard” metric for evaluating each employee’s effectiveness and contributions. Your score is going down? You need to buck up and change something or start looking for another job.

Oh, and make Gulliver’s Travels mandatory reading for all HR functionaries.